Menu

Anything But Quiet

I don’t think I need to say that it’s been anything but quiet around here. My little corner of here and the greater world of here have been loud and chaotic, demanding attention.

But you knew that.

And I said it anyway.

Because it helps me to process the noise if I first acknowledge that THERE IS NOISE.

The constant noise has been like a game for me, as I keep trying to decide what to focus on and which skills to use in mitigating the impact of that particular noise.

Should I focus on the country’s grand campaign to abolish sexual harassment or on the sad and disruptive remnants of the water that poured from my ceiling just a few weeks ago?

Sorry, Kevin Spacey, but the home front wins every time. I need to get my ceilings, walls and floors put back in place before I can even ponder how many people you had to silence in order to get away with hurting so many young men.

Should I focus on the savory juice of long-awaited indictments or on the light bulb situation that has left eight out of the nine track lighting bulbs lifeless?

I’m figuring you guessed that the life bulbs had to win. You gotta fix your lighting situation so your view of the post-indictment CNN circus is really fine.

Every day I do a basic review of stressors and states. I check the relative environments and how I’m handling things, basically. I divide everything up so that I can pinpoint the trouble spots and get resources to those trouble spots asap.

My Part of the World:
Medium/High Stress given the fact that my home got flooded and the damage isn’t fixed yet and I’m having trouble breathing because of the dust.

My Body:
Working pretty well. Whew. Except for not being able to breathe.

My Brain:
Working pretty well. Whew.

My Mentalness:
Pretty good (!!!) I have a list I use to measure how I’m doing mentally. It focuses mainly on things like sleeping problems, waking up problems, ruminating, obsessing, feeling paranoid, and more fun activities. And all of those are running on a very low speed way in the background. I need to give thanks, I suspect, to the recent addition of NAC, a supplement, which appears to be giving a huge boost to some or one of medications. Thank you to the doctor who suggested that. And I highly recommend you research it. Maybe you can try it too. I love it for its boost and for it’s lack of side effects.

My Mood:
My mood and tolerance have been pretty lousy, somewhere between negative and icky, but not too too bad in either respect. I would say mildly icky. BUT….I’ve been living in a torn apart depressing environment for almost three weeks now. So it’s probably reasonable for me to feel a bit down. And it’s reasonable that my version of down is slightly more down than other people’s. I have spent an awful lot of my life being down, after all. I’m used to it. I’m overly practiced, if not perfect.

My Management of My Mentalness and Mood.This is an especially important category. I mostly can’t control my mentalness and mood, but I can manage them better at times. And this week I managed them very well. I did an especially good job at distinguishing between feeling bad about a depressing situation (my home got flooded) and feeling depressed. I can feel that the situation is depressing, but it’s nowhere close to actually feeling depressed. Apples and oranges. My home getting flooded sucks. But I can still wake up, add 2+2, write sentences, laugh at jokes, and enjoy coffee.

So that’s a very good report, obviously. I’m very lucky this week in that I’ve been able to focus on managing stressors. I haven’t had to be distracted by a bad brain or volatile emotions. The timing just happened to work out in my favor. I was able to really focus on distinguishing between living in a depressing situation (the mess at home) and being depressed. As I said earlier, it’s apples and oranges.

Sometimes the timing of events is helpful and sometimes it’s not.

But now, finally, the home front is getting fixed, so that stressor will soon be mitigated, giving me more resources and energy to work on building reserves. As I type this, I hear the lovely sounds of paint being laid upon drywall…..ah, music to my ears.

So now I can build reserves.

Building reserves is important ahead of the holiday season. Whether you like the holiday season or hate the holiday season, there is no escaping the fact that it’s highly stressful. Even if you love it, the people around you at work and at home are more stressed out than usual. One way or another, you have to deal with it.

I happen to love the holiday season. I like the cold, the threat of snow, the music and the tinkly happy Hallmark movies. I especially love when most of DC leaves DC.

But I know that I’ll get blue, since a part of the whole season is the sentimental part …and I have trouble experiencing sentimental feelings. There’s something about feeling sentimental that feels too much like depression and my brain gets confused.

So, I’ll do some practicing of ‘feeling sentimental’ in the weeks leading up to the holidays. I’ll try to get used to having sentimental feelings without being freaked out over the feelings. And I’ll come up with a temporary list of things I can’t really think about. A trigger list, of sorts.

So that’s the deal.

That, and apparently sexual harassment has officially ended.

Woo hoo.

As much as I would love to write on that subject, I won’t for now.

I will just say, everyone must practice being aware. Awareness must be an action, not just a state.

Teach everyone to respect everyone. And teach everyone, female or male or fluid, to respect themselves. Learn about power. Learn about your power. And beware the power of others.

And stop being a silent witness. We’re all silent witnesses at one time or another. Let’s stop doing that.

Okay. Go relax. Live your Saturday. Or whatever day it is when you’re reading this.